New Orleans removes monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee

NEW ORLEANS — They are all gone now. On Friday, the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee became the last of New Orleans’s four contested monuments to go, an end to more than 130 years of publicly honoring a man who embodied Southern pride and racial oppression.

The monuments sat at the entrance to the city’s largest park, on a vaunted greenway, in a major traffic circle in one of this city’s squares. They occupied places where you won’t find many tourists meandering with long-necked frozen cocktails.